Change: Young Obama volunteers starting to quit

The 18-month itch hits every administration. But this presidency is different. The young people working in the White House are supposed to be the truest of true believers. Countless postmortems attribute the Democratic Party’s 2008 success to a unique surge in “Barack the Vote” enthusiasm among 18- to 34-year olds. Many of these folks followed their political hero from the fields of Iowa into the White House—hoping to translate their dreams into policy, and build satisfying careers in the process…

Yet virtually all of the young White House and administration staffers I spoke to (most were unwilling to be named because of the sensitivity of their positions) have grown somewhat disillusioned—and say the glamour factor noted in the Times article is overblown. “It’s cool to my family, or the girl that I meet at the bar, but in terms of day-to-day work—am I really doing the change we can believe in?” asked one Iowa veteran. “Probably not. And it is very much of a shock.”…

Still, there is something poignant about the exodus among the “Yes, We Can” crowd. Key senior staffers such as Daniel Meltzer, Neera Tanden, Linda Douglass, and Sarah Feinberg have all left the White House in recent weeks, expressing a desire for a new direction—or relief from the punishing pace of the Executive Branch. The full-throttle Obama campaign—and the administration’s ambitious agenda since taking office—have clearly taken a toll. “We worked a 22-month campaign where you had to be perfect every single day… and now the stakes are even higher,” says the former agency staffer. “We all celebrated the inauguration, but the next day a lot of us went into work.”